Game Design: More Player Powers

It’s been a couple weeks since I last posted any of the new player powers from the original batch I came up with, though I did post one new power yesterday. Here are a couple more powers from the group that sprung from my “Aha!” moment a couple weeks ago:

Reinforcement [Standard]
Commit 1 Resource to attach 1 Reserve to another target Reserve. (An attached card doesn’t count toward the Reserve limit. It adds its value to the value of the card to which it’s attached.)

This is a weird power that allows you to consolidate cards in your Reserve. It may have been technically possible to attach one Reserve card to itself if I didn’t say “another target,” but that might be too meta for this stage of design. Then again, precautions like this might be just the sort of thing to prevent weird, unforeseeable loopholes and such for activating some cards based on reinforcing other cards with themselves.

Anyway, this power introduces the concept of “attaching” Reserves to each other, for when I eventually design equipment cards, or companion/cohort cards that are intended to support a “main character” or something along that line. Imagine attaching a lieutenant to a commander — that’s the sort of effect I mean.

Anyway, this power is more than likely going to get axed because it introduces a means to render the game unwinnable. Once it becomes possible to boost a Reserve’s value to 13 or higher, it becomes impossible to activate it under the normal rules of the game. It’d be disastrous if all players filled their Reserves with such cards.

Forfeiture [Readied]
When a player is forced to exile one or more cards, exhaust 1 Reserve to reduce the amount of the exile to zero.

This power is meant to directly counteract effects like Banishment, which target low-value cards for massive damage. At the cost of losing one of your cards in the Reserve (pick a card, any card), you can reduce the amount you must exile to zero. Note, this will also let you forfeit a card to protect another player in games with more than two players. Think of it as a heroic sacrifice that doesn’t result in death.

This leaves the defender at a disadvantage because they have one fewer Reserve, but it also affords them the opportunity to remove a poor choice for Reserve, and it does have the nifty-nifty bonus of allowing them to reduce the lost cards to zero. This is partially intended to show how inefficient reactions can be compared to more assertive actions, or how specific an incidence of their need must be.

This is another power that I think will need some serious tweaking before I can be completely happy with it. In the meantime, however, it’s the first power to use an “exhaust cost” instead of a “commit cost,” which is again intended to show the difference between proactive and reactive powers. It’s the first “Readied” power, and depending on playtesting, might be the only reactive power everyone gets.